Spoils From The Victor – Bush Backer Flaunts Gore Pain.

As is the annual custom in this space, my prime GOP source and overall political snitch, Georgetown is loosed for a brutal reappraisal of recent events. Although his tale is long, and amidst the pantheon of the Reality Check faithful, a constant muse of vitriol from this author, there are places in the human heart rarely discovered lest revealed by his rather sharply forked tongue.

jc: I’ll dispense with pretense and let you pick the subject.

Georgetown: George W. Bush is president. Say it.

jc: Not yet.

GT: Mere time. I don’t know why you lied to your readers for three years making noise about shooting Al Gore, or at the very least, cranking out weekly columns depicting him as the fascist scum he truly is when you did nothing for the cause.

jc: The cause?

GT: And then you fucked me with that lame column on the convention. I spent ten days in that miserable excuse of a town enduring countless dinners with NRA geeks and someone claiming to be Jerry Falwell’s “love child” so you can have first-rate coverage and you write about my fistfight in the pit?

jc: Thoughts on the election?

Popular vote? Why do you think both candidates spent millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of time and television ads in the battleground states, so they can clean up the popular vote? Please.

GT: I have to say my favorite are these Democrats going to parties pounding the hard stuff with Bon Jovi and telling anyone who’ll listen that Al Gore won that election because he received the popular vote and got ripped off by the Supreme Court. Popular vote? Why do you think both candidates spent millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of time and television ads in the battleground states, so they can clean up the popular vote? Please. Sell that sore-loser bullshit to the weeping dupes over at ground control.

We watched the Gores parade Hollywood’s elite across Miami until 2:00 am on Election Eve so he could wrap up the close numbers in Florida. He knew he needed it, not some bloated California or New York numbers. Then the fucking networks give Florida up at 7:30 when there are two time zones in the goddamn state. Fucking Tom Brokaw. Wake his ass up for five minutes and drain the vodka out of his veins. What a joke.

jc: And the Supreme Court?

GT: A monumental rim job, that first go-round. This is the weakest line-up of judges in the history of this country and we’ve had some beauts. How these fossils could send a remand to the Florida Supreme Court knowing the goddamn thing was coming back is beyond rational. Why did they waste everyone’s time–for forty pages of nothing telling the court to rethink what they already went to the mat for in the first place? You think the Florida court, already on the DNC payroll, was going to allow that to stop them? Damn right Gore should be pissed at the Supreme Court. They wasted two weeks playing legal volleyball with Tallassee and then seven of nine of these airheads say it’s too late to count?

jc: So you have it on good authority that the Florida Supreme Court was bought off by the Democratic National Committee.

GT: Print that. Nobody pays attention in Florida politics. There are people I heard from down there during this thing that would put Boss Tweed in the minor leagues. This was world-class politics. We were all wired into a main nerve of energy rarely seen in most civilizations. Makes you proud to be an American when you see what serious money can do to the process. And that was right after you wrote that nonsense about “no constitutional crisis.” That took a pair of brass nuts. We were reinventing constitutional crisis down there, pal.

jc: I’m not writing this slanderous nightmare. Not even The Aquarian would print it.

GT: Slanderous? Who the hell are you kidding?

jc: Fair point. How long did you stay in Florida?

GT: Not one day. I received my calls in Washington the whole time. I got the scoop on the deep-red phone. We were making plans if the Supreme Court went belly up.

jc: What plans?

GT: That’s not ending up in Reality Check, anonymous or not.

jc: What happened to your boy, Lazio? Hillary ate him for breakfast upstate.

GT: That’s what “I’m from New York – She’s not” gets you.

jc: What’s the feedback?

GT: He’s our new Jacob Marley.

jc: How do you think Bush ran his campaign?

GT: Mediocre. I knew all along that it was going to be tight. I was against all that money spent in California and I would’ve been more aggressive in New Jersey and Michigan, especially with McCain hanging around. I thought the Dems screwed up by not using Clinton earlier. He helped bring in the minority and middle ground vote in two national elections. Polls never wavered on the fact that he would’ve beaten Bush himself. Gore used him as an excuse. Fact is no one liked Gore. If they could even stand him he would’ve run away with the thing. And I wasn’t too crazy about how Bush handled the drunk-driving thing. My plan was attack. They wanted to explain. That’s no way to run a campaign. Explaining is for losers and preachers. That cost millions of votes.

jc: What was the inside scoop on how the story was leaked so late?

GT: That was a Lieberman gig from day one. His people were working on that since the summer. I know of at least four or five journalists on the Gore campaign who held onto that info for three months.

jc: C’mon.

GT: It’ll come out eventually. It always does.

jc: Thoughts on the cabinet thus far?

GT: I think this Whitman thing is to get her out of the way. And notice that Junior ran foreign policy names up there first. Powell has always been a company man, despite all that Eisenhower “I don’t do politics” shit. And Condoleezza Rice is a genius.

jc: Why does Bush insist on screaming about the inevitable economic down turn, does he want to inherit a serious recession just to fuck the Clinton legacy?

GT: Yes. This is revenge of daddy.

jc: His first move?

GT: Military. He’ll go heavy military, money wise and maybe yank a few troops out of Europe. You’ll never know Clinton was president three months after Jan. 20.